Mountains. So big, and seemingly permanent, though not. On a human timescale they mostly might as well be, but I know better.
I am lucky enough to live in them. Every time I step outside I see something new. If I drive fifteen minutes I am in the middle of an absolute stunning landscape that seems like it should be days from anything resembling civilization. My commute has got to be one of the better ones anywhere on the planet.
The night sky here is just as awesome (in the serious sense of the word) – it took me a few days, after moving here, to realize what that white streak across the sky was. And there were so many stars! The look on my mother’s face a couple of weeks ago when we got here lateish at night and got out of the car and she looked up as I’d told her to when we pulled in…wow.
Within a day or so of travel, you can ge to just about any location on earth. By Monday, if I wanted to, I could be sharing mare’s milk tea with Mongolian nomads, chatting with cannibles, starting a climb to Manchu Pichu, canoeing with pygmies…almost everything the world has to offer is a matter of hours away. If you have a week, you can easily get to the deep sahara and other extremely remote places. All those crazy exotic places in National Geographic? You can just pick up and go there.
Quantum physics. Ever since I picked up “In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat” as a kid, I have been fascinated by all aspects of it. Entangled particles that can communicate instantaneously! Photons that seem to know when they’re being watched and change their behavior! Folded dimensions, and wormholes, and multiple realities! Just absolutely mind-blowing stuff.
I’m fairly agnostic when it comes to things as small as our universe. But when I think of existence itself my mind is boggled. I start to wonder if just the idea of something is enough for it to exist.
Yeah, I was walking to school one day thinking about aliens and how they would be living on their planets, like I lived on mine, and they could be wondering what it was like to live on another planet and, wow, they would be thinking and I was thinking. I lived on a whole planet where people had thoughts!
Every single one of us will die, it’s only a case of when and how. And yet some people are still shocked and surprised when it happens. Fair enough when accidents are so sudden, or illnesses that can come on so quickly and begin so benignly. But some seem to react like they never really thought it would happen at all, and it’s fundamentally wrong that it has.
The Earth’s magnetosphere and how it protects the Earth from the solar wind. And how upper-atmospheric lightning clears paths in the magnetosphere so we can have communications satellites.
Many, many things from science and the natural world when I stop to think about them. Here are a couple of small things, a video of the bola spider, and a fungus that turns ants into zombies.
A typical shooting star is caused by a piece of rock the size of a grain of sand. A chunk a few metres across causes an explosion on a par with the Hiroshima bomb. The Earth gets hit by rocks of that size every couple years on average, but our atmosphere protects us from any serious damage. It’s the hundred year impacts, such as the Tunguska Event, that you have to watch out for.
It makes the mind whirl. In a time where observation and the scientific method is really starting to reveal what’s behind the curtain of reality, it’s unexpected and unintuitive findings like these that really excite me, and think just how dinky the tip of the iceberg is exposed. What a riddle the secrets of the universe hold, and will it ever be solved? It just captures the imagination.
I always fall back to, why does anything exist at all? It’s such a fundamental philosophical question, it almost hurts to think about. Yet, so very compelling.
It’s like a universe in itself. I’m a big fan of Oliver Sacks, and any sort of probing into the inner workings of the mind (Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet, and even the story of My Stroke of Insight by Jill Taylor come to mind). I can’t seem to read enough about the subject. IMHO, it’s the most amazing “object” in the universe. It’s an organ responsible for so much progress and downfall, and we all have one in which our “I” is inexorably tied to. It’s a cosmos within a cosmos, and I’m absolutely and utterly awed by it.
My son (8 yo), in whom I’ve been fortunate enough to share all these amazing things about the universe, astronomy and a bit of physics and chemistry (vicariously, even), because of his immediate enthusiasm for these things, remarked as he saw a bright “light” out the window (granted the sheer curtain was drawn). I laughed as said, “you mean the full moon, buddy?” But it drives home the point how disconnected we’ve become to the grand mystery of “what the hell is all that out there?!”. It’s sad, because it’s as beautiful as the Grand Canyon, a horse, a cat, or even the brain to me. It’s the great unknown, and I lament the fact that unless you live in a remote part of the country, you just can’t see what humanity has seen for millions of years.
Just being here. As an athiest who reads popular science books, just being here wrecks my head. The quantum mechanics is all awe inspiring in its own way. But even all that just answers (in theory) how the universe may have got here. but what even is here? what even is . . . what i have no idea how to even phrase the question. Even if there were other universes that imploded in on itself or other silicon based life forms have risen and fallen on other galaxies. Even if there are other universes growing out of our one and we could travel through to them. Just what is this big thing that allows it all to exist and anything at all to be here. Makes me feel really puny. We are the tiniest blip on something that might not even notice us. If an electron left an atom on our body we wouldn’t notice or feel it. If we destroyed the earth in some stupid nuclear war the universe wouldn’t notice or feel it. Just what is going on?
Watching “isms” at work. Someone being actually sexist or racist or ism’s to do with religion or sexual orientation. I can’t quite get the line of logic and seeing people say or do things. Its just fascinating in its own right. In my own mind I see it as the biggest step in creating artificial intelligence. Someday there will be a computer that will pass the turing test by saying intelligent things. But we will never get a bunch of logic chips to learn how to be that stupid and accept huge paradoxical flawed logic. The stupidity would have to be programmed straight in as opposed to the flawed logic that humans use to come to deduce the conclusions with logic steps that can’t be applied anywhere else. It leaves me simply in awe. But a frustrating awe.
I’m not religious, but when I go to church service, there is something completely awe-inspiring about it for me. I’m not exactly sure why or how, and that adds to the mystery.
-The universe, but, more specifically, the universe as seen through the Hubble telescope. I realize that color has to be added to the photos, but that doesn’t make them any less amazing. I had the opportunity to see the IMAX film Hubble about a year ago, and found it so profoundly beautiful that I very nearly burst into tears. I wasn’t the only one, either.
-Music. Sometimes when I hear something especially beautiful, I’ll stop whatever else I’m doing and just listen to it for awhile. Often I’ll be moved to tears. Even music that isn’t that great to listen to on its own can be great as a background for, say, writing or reading. It has such incredible power over me, and I cannot properly explain why.
-Human cultures. It always astonishes me when even the simplest things that we take for granted (like nodding and head-shaking for “yes” and “no,” respectfully) can be interpreted very differently by another culture. There really isn’t any universal rule that can be applied to human beings, because there will be some culture somewhere that breaks it. You can make generalizations, but sometimes even those don’t work. We truly are a fascinating (and frustrating) species.
